One of Asia's most wanted killed in Indonesia

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Islamist militant Noordin Mohammad Top, the chief suspect in July's suicide bomb attacks on luxury hotels in Jakarta and other deadly attacks, was one of Asia's most wanted men.

Top, a former accountant and maths teacher, was killed during a police raid in Central Java, national police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri said Thursday.

Police initially thought they had killed Top during raids last month in Central Java, but forensic tests later identified the body as that of a suspected accomplice.

Malaysian-born Top was once a key figure in Jemaah Islamiah, a militant group that aimed to create a caliphate across Southeast Asia, but analysts said he created his own more violent splinter group in 2003.

He was suspected of planning the bomb attacks on the JW Marriott in Jakarta in 2003, on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004 and in Bali in 2005 -- attacks designed to scare off foreign tourists and businesses.

Experts said the near-simultaneous attacks last month at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta's main business district used explosives identical to those found in previous Jemaah Islamiah attacks.

The attacks came after a lull of four years during which Indonesia achieved political stability and strong economic growth after a decade of tumult following the ouster of former autocratic president Suharto.

Indonesia's violent jihad seemed to have subsided. Top's partner, the Malaysian bomb-maker Azahari Husin, was killed in 2005. Two Jemaah Islamiah militants were jailed in April 2008, and three Bali bombers were executed in November that year. Top had not been heard from in several years.

The July 17 attacks that killed nine people, including two suspected bombers, and injured scores, seemed to signal he had returned to the fray.

MAGIC POWERS

Top fled to Indonesia with Azahari following a Malaysian crackdown on militants just before the suicide airline attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

Intelligence officials said the two men plotted attacks and recruited young Indonesians, some of them from Islamic boarding schools, to carry them out. Top was the financier and Azahari the bomb-maker. Newspapers called them the "Money Man" and the "Demolition Man."

Indonesian troops from the elite Detachment 88 -- the same force that apparently has tracked down Top -- cornered Azahari, an engineer and former university lecturer, at a house in East Java in November 2005. The father of two was killed, either by a police bullet or by a bomb set off by an accomplice.

Some mystical Javanese believe Top must have possessed magic powers or charms that protected him. He is thought to have escaped a raid in Central Java in 2006 when two other alleged militants were killed.

Police put it down to his reluctance to use easily tracked mobile phones and his reliance on a close network of sympathisers who guarded his whereabouts and acted as his couriers when he needed to send messages to his cells.

Top re-married and depended on his immediate family to hide and help him, Indonesian counter-terrorism officials have said, showing how hard it is to snuff out militancy in Indonesia despite hundreds of arrests and a comprehensive program to deradicalise extremists.

Analysts said Top had been acting on his own since 2003, and had gained a near mythical status among some younger, more radical members of Jemaah Islamiah and other groups.

He reportedly made a video on DIY bomb construction, which included lessons on how "martyrs" should perform their final ritual acts, including prayers and debt repayments, and how to create a video-will.

Top, 41, was born in Johor, southern Malaysia, and completed a bachelor of science at the University of Technology, Malaysia in 1991. He worked briefly as an accountant before launching a career as a jihadist with a bounty of 1 billion rupiah ($99,450) on his head.

Top's disagreement with other Jemaah Islamiah members over the use of violence, even if they killed Indonesians, led him in 2003 to form a far more violent splinter group called Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad, or Organization for the Base of Jihad.

(Additional reporting by Karima Anjani, Sunanda Creagh and Ed Davies; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Jeremy Laurence)